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SEO 101 from the best SEO company in Bangalore

As the leading SEO Company in Bangalore, we decided to provide you with some basic information about how SEO works. We hope you find it useful.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. It’s a practice of constantly improving your website to make it more appealing to search engines in exchange for a high “rank” in their search result pages (SERPs). The results pages of search engines have 2 categories: natural listings and paid listings.

The natural listings are the websites displayed in the middle of the page (sometimes below the top paid listings, which appear for popular keywords) and the paid listings, often known as “Sponsored Ads” or PPC ads, are on the right-hand side of the screen. Have a look at the image of Google search results pages attached to see the difference.

The whole point of SEO is to rank your website as high as possible (preferably #1) for whatever search phrase (keywords) you’re after. Obviously, if you are ranked 5th on page 20, then you will hardly get any traffic. It’s best to hire a SEO company in Bangalore to get you to page 1.

There are no rock-hard rules in SEO and no one knows exactly what it takes to rank high in search engines. However, over the years of tedious testing and experimenting, Internet marketers and SEO companies came up with various factors that search engines use to determine your website’s position in their index.

These ranking factors can be divided into 2 types: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Now let’s discuss them in more detail.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the quick and easy part. The reason I say that, is because it’s all about implementing changes ON your website and making it search engine friendly. When it comes to on-page SEO, it’s all in your hands, so as long as you correctly set up your titles, descriptions, keywords, images and URLs, then you’re pretty much ready to go.

However, since this is very simple to do, most SEO companies in Bangalore do it right and as a result search engines had to come up with other factors to determine the “quality/relevancy” of your website and filter search results more effectively. That’s how off-page SEO was born.

Off-Page SEO

Often known as “link building”, off-page SEO is what really matters for ranking your website. Think of it as a voting system between websites on the Internet. If “John” puts a link on his site pointing to “Bob’s” site, then he’s essentially giving a “vote” to Bob.

There are 2 ways of linking to another site – you can either do it using a direct URL (web address) or you can use something known as an “anchor text”, which is basically a highlighted line of text with a link in it.
While naked URLs (https://www.zepper.in/) are useful for off-page SEO, a better way to tell search engines what the site is about is by using anchor text to describe it. So for example:

“Check out Nike, they have great training shoes”.

As you can see, “training shoes” is an anchor text with a link pointing to Nike. So what I’m doing here is giving my “vote” to Nike and telling search engines that Nike’s website is about training shoes.

Now Nike has one “backlink” from my website with an anchor text “training shoes”.

And that’s exactly how search engines use the anchor-text to understand what the page/website is about and what keywords it should be ranked for.

Therefore, when you’re building backlinks to your website, you have to select relevant anchor text for whatever page you’re targeting, so hopefully, when you have enough backlinks and generally a good link profile, you’ll rank for whatever keyword you’re after.

Of course, this is a very simplified explanation of how it works, but what’s important to understand, is the fact that Google and other search engines heavily rely on anchor-text backlinks to evaluate websites and better understand their content. In general, that’s what off-page SEO is all about – getting loads of relevant anchor-text links from as many different websites as possible (be careful not to over-optimize your website by using the same anchor-text all the time).

Keep in mind, that anchor-text backlinks pointing to your website are essentially the keywords that you want to get ranked for. That means that you should do in-depth keyword research and identify the search phrases, which have commercial value. You want to find the keywords that have decent monthly search volume but are not too competitive, so you can get to #1 fairly easy. And that brings us to the final part of SEO 101…

Reality Check

SEO is a very competitive field, so when you’re just starting out or even if you have a bit of experience, it’s still advisable to stay away from crazy keywords that have millions of competing websites. Some examples would be – make money online, lose weight, car insurance, etc. I’m not saying it’s impossible to get ranked for those terms, but it will take you literally years to get there and it won’t be cheap either… As your SEO company in Bangalore, it’s our job to find you relevant keywords that are cheap and easy to rank.

A smarter way to do SEO is to go after so called “long-tail” keywords. For example, instead of targeting “make money online”, you could go after something like “how to make money online with Google”. I bet that’s still a pretty competitive keyword, but you get the idea.

Basically, you want to target keywords that have 3-4 or more words in them, which usually means less competition and generally better conversions as well. However, they obviously have less volume, than shorter keywords, but once you get ranked for a few long-tail keywords, then the traffic adds up to good numbers.

Of course, you also have to realize that just because you chose to go after long-tails, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the competition will be easy. You still have to check how many exact match results your keyword returns (search the keyword in “quotes” in Google), what’s the PR/age/size of top 10 websites, their on-page SEO and the strength of their link profiles, etc.

Overall, SEO is just a numbers game. You build lots of backlinks, you get ranked, you make a profit, then you re-invest the profits into your website to get ranked for more keywords to make more money and the list goes on. Again, as your SEO company in Bangalore, we will find the easy keywords for you.

Smart Link Building

Gone are the days when you could send thousands of backlinks with the same anchor-text to your homepage and get ranked #1 for fairly competitive keywords within a week or two. Nowadays, it’s crucial to do deep-linking, which means building backlinks to your inner pages, not just the homepage.

For example, if your website is about cars, then you could have a category for BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, etc. Deep-linking to those individual pages will not only provide better user experience to your visitors but also help you to maintain a more natural link profile and keep Google happy.

As a general rule of thumb, the links pointing to your homepage should accumulate to about 40-60%, and with the rest of the links pointing to the inner pages of your website. Basically, all you want to do is create a natural-looking link profile, so when Google comes around they won’t see 10000 links pointing to the homepage and 20 links to inner pages. Obviously, sooner or later this will have a negative effect on your site, so to stay “safe” keep your links balanced to around 60/40 (homepage/inner pages). Many SEO companies in Bangalore aren’t aware of this and they can get your website penalized.

EMDs (Exact Match Domains) and New Websites

It’s a very popular SEO tactic nowadays to buy an EMD for your keyword and try to get the homepage ranked for the main term. For example, if your keyword is “how to lose weight”, then you would try to get a domain “howtoloseweight.com” or “.net” or “.org”. You may have to add some suffixes or prefixes if the exact domain is not available.

Well, there’s a reason why this method is popular, and that’s because it works! However, the guys who choose to go for this method are usually those who get in trouble with Google. I’m talking about slaps, Google dances, penalties and in the worst cases, complete de-indexation.

The problem is that it’s really easy to get carried away building backlinks to the homepage without paying much attention to inner pages. And EMD websites usually have very little content, maybe 2-3 pages, so it’s a clear sign of over-optimization. It’s a good idea to put together “privacy policy”, “about”, “contact us” and “terms” pages, as it seems to create some authority in Google’s eyes.

Something to keep in mind for new website owners is that the sites, which are less than 3-6 months old, are more likely to experience “Google dance” during link building, rather than established 2-3 years old websites. It’s absolutely normal and every website goes through that stage.

As you keep building more and more links, Google will be readjusting your rank in SERPs, occasionally giving high positions, but they won’t necessarily be stable. After a few weeks/months, your rankings will become more settled (assuming you’ve done solid link building and haven’t over-optimized). The same thing applies to older sites, but they tend to “bounce” less.

Some guys like to create so called “buffer sites”, which are usually web 2.0 sites, such as Squidoo or Hubpages, and they use them to “filter links” through them, instead of pointing loads of backlinks directly at the money-page (main website). This is especially useful if you’re planning to do mass link building using automated tools.

How To Avoid Google Over-Optimization Penalties

After Google Penguin, the topic of over-optimization has become especially popular on SEO forums. The penalties and slaps for aggressive optimization usually happen when you blatantly build links only to your homepage, they all have the same anchor text and your whole website is focused around one keyword, which is also in your URL as well. This obviously raises a red flag in the eyes of Google and it results in loss of rankings, in the worst case, a de-indexation of the site.

So what’s the solution? Simply mix up your link building – vary the anchor text, deep-link to your inner pages and get links from different sources.

It sounds easy, but not many people follow this advice. Don’t go too crazy with building links to your homepage – send some to the inner pages, where you could target other long-tail keywords. You could even throw in some “click here” and “visit this website” anchor-text links for a good mix as well. This will keep your link profile natural and provide a long life for your website.

The State of SEO After Google Penguin Updates

Many SEOs are still confused about the latest Google Penguin updates and how you are supposed to do link building in the future. The Penguin update has probably been one of the most effective so far in terms of eliminating “over-optimized” websites, but strangely enough, some genuine sites with very little SEO and simple anchor-text optimization have been negatively affected as well.

That’s the reason why lots of guys are lost now and wondering what to do next. Well, hopefully, this post will give you a good idea on how to go forward from here on and help you recover your sites or finally reach the top spots for the keywords you’re struggling.

The Goal of Google Penguin

The main purpose of Penguin update was to penalize the sites, which had more than 50% of their links targeting the same exact anchor text. For example, if you have a website “niceshoes.com” and 80% of the links coming to your site had anchor text “nice shoes”, then it’s very likely that you were affected by this update and lost your rankings.

However, it’s also important to mention that NOT all sites with unnatural link profiles have been hit by Google Penguin update. I’m sure many of you guys have websites with crazy-optimized anchor texts and yet those sites weren’t affected at all. This simply goes to show that the big G’s algorithms are still ineffective at detecting how good/bad your link profile is.

So what’s the lesson to be learned here? Diversify your anchor texts. Getting links from many different sources is only half of the story, but you should also use different anchor texts similar to your main keyword when building backlinks, which will help to make your link profile “more natural”.

That also answers the question of how to recover from Penguin update. It’s simple, keep building backlinks from as many sources as possible and mix-up your anchor text. With a bit of time and diversity of links, your site will come back. Adding some fresh content to the site will be useful too. As we learned from Panda updates of 2011, Google doesn’t like “thin sites”, so the more content the better.

Content Relevancy

Another thing that Google tried to achieve with their Penguin updates is lower the “power” of non-relevant links coming to your site. So carrying on with the above example of “niceshoes.com”, links from sites about cars or mobile phones “should” give you less juice, but in practice, everything still works pretty much the same way it has for the past 4-5 years.

We believe this is still in VERY early stages of development and it will take Google quite a while before they start to understand better how to filter non-topical links (if this will ever happen). Besides, there are plenty of “general” websites, which have categories and assuming your link comes from a relevant category, then it’s supposed to be topical? Therefore, don’t get too stuck on “relevancy” and instead concentrate on diversity and volume of your links.

Moving On

Overall, as you can see, nothing groundbreaking has happened after Penguin. We should’ve known that sooner or later some measure against anchor text over-optimization was going to come from Google. In a conclusion, I would like to say that the diversity is the key factor in your link building efforts – vary your link sources, mix up your keywords and the keep the links coming at steady/natural pace. And remember, SEO is a long-term game.

How SEO Can Help Your Business Grow

Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, is a sure-fire way of increasing your website’s online visibility and, in turn, gaining more customers. Businesses in Adelaide without a website should consider having one, and those already with websites should implement effective search engine optimization to ensure that the target audience is reached and converted into customers.

In achieving this, Adelaide SEO provides various services that are proven to generate more website traffic, increase client numbers and improve the ROI (return on investment).

Benefits of SEO

Increase in Online Visibility and Customer Database

No business is too small. By optimizing your website and its content, it will not only give you a competitive edge in search engine rankings, but it will also generate more traffic and boost your website’s customer database. Remember, the more visitors a website has, the higher its potential profit becomes.

Reach the Targeted Market

Apart from just getting more traffic, finding the right website visitors is also a must for business growth.

Every day, thousands and millions of people use the internet to search for products and services, but for a business to really reach and get the right people to visit its website, it requires an effective organic, traffic-generating strategy.

What does finding the right audience mean for a business? It is simple. The answer is higher conversion rates and an increase in profits. When a user finds a website relevant to the products and services he/she is looking for, there is a higher chance to convert that visitor into a paying customer, which, in turn, results in earning higher profits.

Long-term Results

When a website shows up in higher rankings of search engine results, it means the products and services of that website is relevant to what a user is searching for, and therefore it is recommended to visit the website. Only a well-implemented search engine optimization plan can help consistently gain more users and customers over long periods of time.

Get Ahead of the Competition

With the numerous brands and websites popping out every day under different niches, it is hard to tell how you can compete well if you do not have a solid SEO plan.

Finding the right audience, designing a user-friendly website and providing valuable content are only a few of the tricks that could help a website be on top of the competition. With the right SEO efforts, a website can either outdo the competitors or maintain its lead from the rest.

Cost-Effective Than PPC Advertising

Instead of spending for pay per click campaigns to advertise your site and gain potential customers, implementing SEO is a more cost-effective method that gives you longer-lasting results. There is no need to spend huge amounts of money for a limited-time exposure. Just have a site with useful, well-optimised content and watch the traffic grow consistently.

Regardless of niche and industry, Adelaide SEO can help turn a website into a stable profit-earning and well-branded business through search engine optimization services that focus on quality results.

To learn more about SEO or to find out the right services that will fit your business, talk to us. After all, we are the best SEO company in Bangalore.

Search engine optimization is the art of improving your business’ online visibility and increasing its reach. Its end-goal is to establish your business as a brand to be reckoned with in your particular industry.

One major aspect of SEO is blogging, or the regular production of insightful and relevant content.

Blogging: How Does It Work?

Entrepreneurs need to understand that site activity plays a major role in determining your site’s search engine rankings. This is because the search engine spiders are specifically designed that way. Incidentally, one of the easiest ways to improve site activity is by regularly uploading relevant content onto your blog. Just make sure that there are links and a call to action for your readers to follow at the end of each entry.

One of our clients, Yes Coupons increased traffic to their Amazon Credit Card Offers website by constantly blogging about the latest deals, offers, and discounts on online shopping in India. Another client, Travelyze, was able to increase their traffic by 40% for their website providing cheap tickets and airfare deals on Mumbai To Delhi Flights.

Benefits of Blogging

Blogging brings a number of benefits that makes it a must-try for all businesses. Perhaps one of its most important benefits is that it can put you in the position of being an industry leader. By regularly posting smart and informative content, you establish yourself as an expert in your particular niche. This not only lends credibility to you as a writer, but it can also give your business a significant boost in the process as well.

This article delves into this topic to give entrepreneurs a better idea of how this particular strategy works.

Paid Search Clicks or ‘Pay Per Click’ as an online advertising model has become an integral part of the sales and marketing strategy of many businesses. This has the advantage of positioning adverts where they are most likely to appeal to people interested in your services.

If a person browsing or searching the Internet uses a keyword that matches your own keyword list, or if they visit a site that displays related or relevant content, then your advertisement will be displayed. This is called a sponsored link or a sponsored ad.

Initially, PPC advertising was open to abuse and fraud from competitors or other malicious operators, but Google and other search engines have protected their model by developing automated systems that detect and prevent such attacks.

Going Mobile at the Speed of Light

Now, the world is going mobile, and researchers predict that a third of Paid Search Clicks will be activated on a mobile device by the end of 2013. This represents a jump from 10% at the beginning of 2012 – a staggering 300% increase in the space of two years. Marin Software, a US based software company analysing paid search campaigns globally, investigated a pool of approximately 2,000 companies. They concluded that mobile devices are now more often “at the heart of the modern shopper’s buying process”.

Is Your Website Mobile?

The implication for the SEO mobile website is that the websites now need to work well on the mobile devices that many of their potential customers are using. Zepper SEO says there’s a range of challenges for businesses wanting to adapt their websites for mobile use. It’s important that your mobile website is easy to use and attractive on a mobile device. If it’s ‘clunky’, difficult to read or navigate, and doesn’t allow your browsers to see the most important aspects of your business quickly and easily, you might actually drive customers away.

There are many issues to address, such as screen size, availability of types of pages such as Flash and other such issues. Mobile capabilities are moving so quickly, that this is an area where you must remain up to date, and ensure that your mobile website is also up to date.

For example, did you know that Google has now removed any distinction between tablets and desktop computers? However, Google still shows a distinction between smartphones and desktops/tablets when it comes to paid search adverts.

The best way to make sure you stay up to date is to have your website and your mobile website built by the same experts. Zepper SEO has this capability, and also recommends that you link this with your website and mobile web marketing search engine optimization strategies. This will ensure that you have an integrated strategy to attract customers. It will also help you to maximize your marketing dollar and give you a single point of accountability for your online marketing.

Zepper SEO offers a full web and mobile web design service, and can integrate this into a search engine optimization program that will assist you to see early and ongoing results from your online presence and marketing.

Email marketing is one of the most important elements of any online marketing campaign. In the following article, we shall be looking into three effective tips on writing good email subject lines that can actually boost your email open rate and get you a higher response.

Make sure that you hint at a sense of urgency for your subscribers in the subject line.

Nobody wants to lose on a good offer and when you show your readers that it is there for a limited time, they won’t waste much time to open your email and read. This subject line is a huge “call to action” for your list. So when you make it time sensitive and when you show your readers that they have to take action right away, clicking on the subject line becomes a part of the action. Most of the copywriters know the value of scarcity and use it on a regular basis to create a demand in their target market.

People will take action now rather than waiting until later if they feel the offer will be off the table in the future. Just remember that not every email needs to be an urgent offer. In fact, you should only do it when you genuinely mean it, because if you write the same kind of subject line every time, it will lose meaning and purpose, which will obviously affect the overall results.

Include the words “here” and “this” whenever possible in your subject lines.

These are power words of a different league because they psychologically condition the reader to read the email what’s in it. What this means is that lines like “here’s the solution you’ve been waiting for” or “this secret will change your life forever” are more likely to get the response of a click because of the emotional chord they strike. That’s what I’m talking about! When subject lines touch readers on an emotional level you’re more likely to get the response from them that you want. You obviously have to live up to your subject line with your email content, but that’s another thing. Try it today and see what a difference these power words make for your open rate.

These are power words of a different league because they psychologically condition the reader to read the email what’s in it. What this means is that lines like “here’s the solution you’ve been waiting for” or “this secret will change your life forever” are more likely to get the response of a click because of the emotional chord they strike. That’s what I’m talking about! When subject lines touch readers on an emotional level you’re more likely to get the response from them that you want. You obviously have to live up to your subject line with your email content, but that’s another thing. Try it today and see what a difference these power words make for your open rate.

Last but not the least; ask a thought-provoking question in your subject line, which compels your reader to click through to your email.

Most people are driven to find answers when their curiosity is struck. Offer the answer inside your email and see how well it works to use human nature like a curiosity for your benefit. This will greatly improve open rates for your campaigns. Open-ended questions are the best choice for this to work. It’s important that you make your readers believe the answer is relevant to and needed by them. This method allows you to use the same method for even better results over time.

In conclusion, from the above article, we come to clearly understand the importance of focusing on the subject line of the email in order to get a higher response from the readers.

We have been discussing local lead generation tips over the last few weeks in different forms to help small businesses grow. Many of the tips discussed can help businesses grow and increase their search rankings if done properly and today we will add to this knowledge base by discussing the importance of keyword research.

Keyword research is important to understanding your search engine rankings in your particular niche. Different articles you read will teach different methods for determining the keywords you should use for your business, but we will give you a guide for determining these keywords that work well for us and the clients we work with.

We will also include best practice information from the internet marketing industry so you can rest assured you will have a good foundation after reading this post. So below read the 5 tips to enhance keyword research results for your business to increase your search results.

Determine Your Own Keywords

At the beginning, you need to determine your keywords based on your particular niche. Every industry has different keywords that define their market and you should be familiar with what these are. Start with these keywords and use some of the other techniques discussed below to help you in the process.

For example, if you are a lawyer and you want to attract more customers through the internet and you should determine your niche specific keywords based on your niche. So depending on the type of law you practice these will be the beginning of your keywords. So you can have a divorce lawyer, estate lawyer, a defense lawyer, etc. All of these specific titles are keywords within your target market.

In addition to using your own knowledge of your industry, you should also make the keywords geo-targeted. The keywords should be relevant to your target market. Using the lawyer example again, if you are in Dallas, Texas you don’t want to promote your company in Miami, Florida (unless of course, you are a national firm). So you would further define your keywords as Dallas divorce attorney. These geo-specific keywords help make your business relevant to search results.

Use Long-tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are a great way to further define your target market and stand out from the crowd. If you are an architect and you want to stand out from the crowd of other design professionals instead of saying Los Angeles Architect, you might say Los Angeles health care architect with 20 years experience. The addition of the specific niche and experience are great long-tail keywords that help you stand out and help the search engines identify you as a possible search result.

Long-tail keywords are also used to help you differentiate search keywords from buyer keywords. People search the internet all the time and there is a difference between people looking for information and people looking to purchase something. You need to differentiate your search terms/keywords based on this information. If you were looking for yellow sparkle shoes and you typed that into the search engine if you saw 8 of the 9 first page listing describing shoes in general, and then one show store talking about the yellow sparkle shoes and the variations available, more likely than not you just found the store you will visit to purchase the shoes or the place you will buy them online.

The better you get at defining your own long-tail keywords the better your conversions will be because you will be speaking to the people that are looking to be customers and buy from you not just get information from you. Determining the long-tail keywords does take some research and knowledge of the niche, but once you hit that sweet spot, your revenue will grow. Below in the other tips, we will discuss some ways to determine your long-tail keywords.

Use Search Engine Suggestions

One of the best ways to determine what people are searching for is to look at the suggestions provided by the search engines. When you begin typing something into the search field you will see the suggestions appear to try and figure out what you are typing. These suggestions are made because other people have entered these keywords in the past.

Looking at the example below for how to . . ., you see the search engine returns a few suggestions, lose weight, make money fast, fall asleep fast, get pregnant fast. Each of these suggestions has been entered in multiple times by people looking for this information. Understand that you need to target the pages on your website to this information because people are looking for this info.

Below is a list of search engines you should try this technique out on, and remember even though Google is the top dog at the moment, you should not forget the others. Some people do not like to use Google, as strange as that may sound. There are people that like to use the underdog or the item others are not using. Some people just like the user interface of the other search engines as well.

Google

Yahoo

Bing

Blekko

Ask

Dogpile

In addition to the search engine list above and the suggestions you get from them, don’t forget about the related searches that is usually supplied at the bottom of your search results. If you look at the example below you see additional keywords the search engines suggest for the how to keyword. Remember these related results appeared because people are typing in this information.

Use Search Engine Tools

Another good way to determine keywords for your business is to use some of the free tools that are available on the internet. The list of tools below have free and paid versions. Some are easier to use than others but each tool provides good quality information to use in your business. You can click on the tool in the list below to be taken to each individual website.

The most used tool of the list above is the Google Keyword Planner tool. This tools ties to the Google Adwords system which powers their marketing arm. This area of Google is where they make the majority of their money so you can trust the information given here is accurate since they want to provide you actionable information to use with their system when you decide to use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Each tool offers pros and cons, but we are not here to be biased, but just give you the information to make an informed decision to help grow your business. Honestly, each tool mentioned above can help you determine good keywords to use for your business, just try them all and determine the tool that works best for you and is the easiest you use in your opinion.

Check Competitors Keyword Rankings

The last tip for doing good keyword research is to look at what your competitor is doing. It is never good to just copy the competitor because even in the same market different businesses may cater to different areas of the business. So your competition is not the end all be all of your specific keywords, but they will give you a good insight into possible ways to focus on the profitable keywords to use in your industry.

A good tool you can use to analyze the keywords your competitors are using is Spyfu. This is a great tool to investigate the keywords your competitor is using in their paid and organic traffic. The free version gives you just a few samples of the information and the paid version lets you see even more detailed information. There are other tools on the market that can do this as well, but we have found this is a great tool that offers good information at the free and paid level.

In addition to some tools to help you determine your competitor’s keywords, you can also monitor the blog post and articles written by your competition. Oftentimes information within these media forms can help a business determine good keywords to go after as well. Never underestimate what the competition is doing and how you can use some of their information to help grow your business as well. But like we said above never steal (the search engines hate duplicate content) just take cues from them and make it your own.

The tips above will help give you the foundation to approach keyword research with a goal in mind. Each business should also look at the keyword difficulty to determine if that particular keyword is even worth going after. Some keywords are just too difficult to waste valuable time on and many of the tools above can help you determine this as well. As a business owner only you can determine what type of time you can put into trying to dominate a specific keyword and the difficult ones can pay off in the end if you put in the time and effort.

Some business owners do not have the time to commit to learning the skills necessary to dominate their local markets, but for those that do or for consultants that want to add valuable information to their toolbox look at this local lead gen training to take your business to the next level. No matter what business you are in understanding keyword research is important to help you grow your business and becoming relevant on the internet.

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Search engine optimization is a crucial element of any decent digital marketing plan. In today’s increasingly competitive market, it is probably one of the most effective ways to bring your brand to the global arena.